Exercise: organise a real folder and generate a document
This exercise runs the full file-organisation and document-generation workflow on a real folder — your actual files, in a sandbox you control. By the end, you'll have run Cowork's most important demo use case, read its audit log, steered a correction, and produced a summary document. This is the sequence you'll repeat on real work.
Step 1—Create your sandbox folder
Create the directory ~/ClaudeCowork/sandbox/exercise-4/ if it doesn't exist already.
Then go to your real Downloads folder (or Desktop) and copy 10–20 files into exercise-4/. Copies only — do not move originals. Choose a realistic mix: a PDF or two, some images, maybe a spreadsheet or Word doc. The messier and more varied, the better the demo.
Do not rename anything. Leave the files exactly as they are — cryptic camera names, long downloaded filenames, all of it. That's the point.
What file did Cowork misclassify (or move to REVIEW/ unexpectedly), and why do you think it got it wrong?
Key Takeaways
- 1Always work on copies in a sandbox folder — never run your first file-organisation task on originals.
- 2ORGANIZATION-LOG.md is the real deliverable: it shows you exactly what Cowork decided and why, which is where you catch misclassifications before they become problems.
- 3The steering loop is the workflow: let Cowork do the bulk organisation, read the log, correct the exceptions — you're reviewing at the category level, not file by file.